Thursday, December 29, 2016

The snow is falling heavily and it is a great time during which to reflect on the 2016 year.

Every year at this time, as the Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks at the Isenberg School of Management at UMass Amherst, I write up a Congratulations and Kudos page, which is posted on the center site. It allows the supernetwork team to look back at some of the accomplishments of the year.

For those of you who may have missed it, it is reposted below, with additional links added. Many thanks for the support and Happy New Year!

2016 was a year to remember! With this message it
gives me great pleasure as the Center Director to summarize some of the
accomplishments and achievements of the Center Associates of the Virtual
Center for Supernetworks!

Also, in 2016, the book, Dynamics of Disasters: Key Concepts, Models, Algorithms, and Insights,
co-edited by Professor Ilias S. Kotsireas, me, and Professor Panos M.
Pardalos, was published by Springer. The co-editors organized the 2015 Dynamics of Disasters conference that was held in Kalamata, Greece, and
this volume, consisting of 18 refereed chapters, contains papers
presented at the conference, along with contributions from other
experts, including several that I had hosted at the Isenberg School of
Management. The volume's contributors include both academics and
practitioners; several from the United Nations. I have two chapters in
the book, one on freight service provision, and another chapter on an
integrated disaster relief model with stochastic link costs, co-authored
with Center Associate Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney of the University
of Hartford.

Center Associate Ladimer S. Nagurney had
spent the 2015-2016 academic year on sabbatical as a Visiting Professor
at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst.

I was very honored to be a Visiting Fellow at
All Souls College at Oxford University, considered the top university
in the world. I spent the Trinity term there (for about two and a half
months) and was one of twelve Visiting Fellows during that term
representing fields from economics to anthropology. I was provided with
an apartment, a beautiful office with a view of a fountain and garden.
There, I was able to complete several papers on supply chains, as well
as the co-editing of the Dynamics of Disasters volume. While at Oxford, I
had the chance to travel to London to see Center Associate Dr. Stavros
Siokos, Managing Partner at Astarte Capital Partners, at a special
dinner that he hosted for Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney, our daughter,
and me at the Royal Automobile Club.

Research continued not only on supply chains,
disaster relief, the Braess paradox, as well as various
Internet-related topics, including work funded on an NSF EAGER grant
that I am working on with Professor Tilman Wolf of the College of
Engineering and collaborators at the University of Kentucky. In
addition, research continues on the development of models to provide
Internet services to rural and poor regions with collaborators in
Colombia.

Congratulations to Center Associate Sara Saberi who successfully defended her doctoral dissertation, Network
Game Theory Models of Services and Quality Competition with
Applications to Future Internet Architectures and Supply Chains, in
2016. She is now an Assistant Professor at the Foisie School of
Business at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts.

Doctoral Student Center Associate Deniz Besik
was very active as an officer of the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student
Chapter and the chapter was recognized with its 11th award, in as many
years, at the INFORMS Annual Meeting, with the Cum Laude Award.
Additionally, it was a great honor to be recognized at the INFORMS
Annual Meeting with the inaugural Distinguished Service Award from
INFORMS.

The INFORMS conference served as a great venue
for many Center Associates to reconvene, with presenters including
Center Associates Professor Ding Zhang of SUNY Oswego, Professor Patrick
Qiang of Pennsylvania State University Great Valley, Professor Zugang
Liu of Pennsylvania State University Hazleton, Professor Trisha Anderson
of Texas Wesleyan University, Professor Amir H. Masoumi of Manhattan
College, Professor Min Yu of the University of Portland, Professor
Dmytro Matsypura of the University of Sydney in Australia, Professor
Jose M. Cruz of the University of Connecticut, Professor Dong Li of
Arkansas State University, Professor Sara Saberi, and Doctoral Student
Center Associates Shivani Shukla and Deniz Besik. It was Deniz's first
INFORMS conference.

Center Associates were also prominent at the
EURO conference held in Poznan, Poland, in the summer of 2016, with
Professor Patrizia Daniele of the University of Catania in Italy
organizing sessions and also Professor Tina Wakolbinger of the Vienna
University of Economics and Business in Austria. Professor Dmytro
Matsypura also presented there. Notably, the paper: "Competitive Food
Supply Chain Networks with Application to Fresh Produce," Min Yu and
Anna Nagurney, European Journal of Operational Research 224(2): (2013) pp 273-282, was recognized in a special session there organized by the Editors of the European Journal of Operational Research
as one of two papers published in the past several years in that
journal that is highly cited and impactful. I had the pleasure of
presenting on our joint work. Also, Professor Ladimer S. Nagurney
presented on our latest work on the Braess paradox, presenting proof of
existence for electrical circuits that were constructed.

Additional congratulations to Center Associate
Professor Trisha Anderson! She was recognized with the Engaging
Educator Award from her university. The award goes to professors who go above and beyond to engage their students with research and the community.

Professor Tina Wakolbinger had a very busy
and successful year and continues as Professor of Supply Chain Services
and Networks, the Director of the Master Program in Supply Chain
Management, and Head of the Research Institute for Supply Chain
Management at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. She
serves as VP of Awards at POM College of Humanitarian Operations and
Crisis Management and is a member of the Board of the Euro Working Group
on Humanitarian Operations.

Congratulations to Center Associate Jose M.
Cruz. He continues to serve as the Executive Program Director of the
very successful Master of Science in Business Analytics and Project
Management (MSBAPM) degree program at the School of Business, University
of Connecticut. He also received a grant from the Business School to
work on global supply chains.

Wednesday, December 28, 2016

It felt very good to submit my course grades last week, especially since the final exam for my Transportation and Logistics class at the Isenberg School was quite late this year - December 22 and that was also the deadline for the course project papers.

The exam was from 10:30AM-12:30PM and the students had wanted cookies so I had baked (again) and brought the plate of goodies below. Good for motivation, as well. It was fun to see which students selected a cookie at the beginning of the exam, at the middle, or at the end.

The day was very cold and it was snowing and, luckily, I had my Teaching Assistant, doctoral student in Management Science, Deniz Besik, to assist me with proctoring the exam. This was extremely helpful since one student thought the exam was at 1:30PM and we realized this into the exam that the student was missing. A quick call and the student literally flew in and finished the exam in one hour with the help of a lot of adrenalin.

At the Isenberg School of Management, and many other business schools, part of the education of our doctoral students, in order to prepare them for careers in academia (or they realize that industry is better suited for them or another type of career post PhD), involves having them actually teach undergraduate courses. The doctoral students usually teach one course, for two or three semesters, beginning in their third year of the doctoral program. This is rarely done in engineering schools.

Prior to that, students can serve as a TA (Teaching Assistant) and/or an RA (Research Assistant). Being a TA can include holding office hours, helping the professor grade homeworks, and giving a lecture or two in order to gain experience. Such experiences help a student decide whether or not she/he is interested in teaching and research as a career. One learns lessons of responsibility, how to best explain course material to students during office hours, and how to evaluate homeworks. The personal interactions between students and the TA I believe are very important and I was pleased, but not surprised, how much my undergraduates appreciated Deniz during this past semester. Some students may prefer going to a doctoral student's office hours than to a professor's although I must admit that there were several students this past semester that were frequent visitors to both of our office hours. Many times, students want to chat and to also discuss their career paths and it is nice to have another set of ears and someone else to offer advice. Also, it may be helpful to have someone else explain some of the material, which may be done in a slightly different way. In addition, since our Operations and Information Management students at the Isenberg School are so bright and hard-working, and also intellectually curious, they often are also interested in the TA's research as well as the professor's.

Being a TA builds a doctoral student's confidence and also helps the student prepare for teaching a course independently. In some years, I have had the TA sit in my class as well, to learn how to respond to questions, how to lecture, etc. Some, based on this experience, become very eager to teach, and it is great to see them standing in front of a class to teach their first class at Isenberg! Some of our doctoral students in Management Science have become so successful in the classroom (one example is my PhD student, Shivani Shukla) that they have received the Isenberg Outstanding Doctoral Student Teaching Award, which is an annual award given out in the spring. Shivani last semester elected not only to teach a face-to-face class (Business Data Analysis) but also a class online (Introduction to Operations Management) to garner additional experience. This certainly looks great on a cv when a doctoral student is on the job market!

In addition, while being a TA, and also having full responsibility for teaching a class, a doctoral student learns how to juggle both research and teaching, since without a dissertation, one does not get a PhD. Hence, important time management skills are learned and these help one in the profession after graduation.

After the exams were handed in last Thursday by the undergraduates, I took my TA out to lunch at the University Club at UMass Amherst. Also, visiting were my former PhD student, and co-author of the Competing on Supply Chain Quality book, Dr. Dong "Michelle" Li, and her fiancee, who is a postdoc at MIT. My daughter, who is a doctoral student at another university, also joined.

At the lunch I was presented with an MIT beaver, which we named "Bucky" and I think it is a great inspiration for continuing the hard work, which is also very enjoyable and rewarding!

Tuesday, December 20, 2016

I have been very lucky to not only have met the benefactor of my chaired professorship but to also have enough of a relationship with him that I can communicate and share experiences with him.

In 1998, I became the John F. Smith Memorial Professor at Operations Management at the Isenberg School of Management. I was the first female appointed to a chaired professorship in the University of Massachusetts system, consisting of 5 campuses, including the UMass Medical School in Worcester.

Part of having a chaired professorship, I believe, is stewardship, and that should entail not only, according to its definition, of: responsible planning and management of resources, but also staying in touch with the benefactor/donor, if that is at all possible. The chaired professorship that I hold was made possible by John F. Smith Jr. or "Jack Smith," an alumnus of the Isenberg School of Management, class of 1960, who endowed the professorship in honor of his father, who was also a UMass Amherst alumnus, but of its Stockbridge School. Jack Smith Jr. was the chairman of the board of General Motors from 1996 to 2003 and the CEO from 1992 to 2000. He has been a member of Delta's Board of Directors since 2000, so, clearly, transportation is in his "blood" and we have a common passion for operations management. What has always impressed me about Jack Smith, is his incredible intellect and memory as well as ideas for innovation.

Yesterday, I shipped off a package to Jack Smith, with two letters, one detailing some of the accomplishments of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks, that I founded and have directed since 2001, and our great students at the Isenberg School, and a holiday letter. I also enclosed in the package three books:Competing on Supply Chain Quality, co-authored with my former PhD student, Dr. Dong "Michelle" Li, Dynamics of Disasters: Key Concepts, Models, Algorithms, and Insights, co-edited with Professors Ilias S. Kotsireas and Panos M. Pardalos, and STEM Gems, by Stephanie Espy, in which I was honored to be one of 44 inspiring female role models in STEM for my work on networks. All these books were published in 2016 so they should make for some pleasant holiday reading.

Jack Smith has come back to UMass and the Isenberg School on several occasions, since I became a chaired professor, and we also have a classroom named in his honor. He, along with other luminaries, such as Ken Feinberg and Jack Welch, also UMass Amherst alums, serves as an honorary co-chair of the UMass Rising Campaign. A video for the campaign, in which I also speak, can be accessed here. In fact, one of the seeds for supernetworks and our center germinated when Jack gave a talk at UMass and spoke about interfaces between telecommunications and transportation in the context of vehicle mobility and it was clear that networks of networks or supernetworks would be an area that would generate theory and applications for years to come, which it has! Our Supernetworks book, which I co-authored with Dr. June Dong was published in 2002.Below are some photos taken on one of Jack's visits to the Isenberg School, when he visited the Supernetworks Lab. Many of the Center Associates featured in the photos, have since received their PhDs, and are now professors. Several, who were undergraduates then, such as David Soffer and Christina Calvaneso, are having fascinating professional careers in business. A full list is available here.

This blogpost is also a thank you to Jack Smith, whose support has enabled us to have a thriving, award-winning UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter, a center that builds bridges and has collaborators from multiple continents, and a home where speakers and visitors always feel a warm welcome.

Saturday, December 17, 2016

Now is that great time of the year when there are a lot of holiday parties including end of the semester parties.

For those of us in academia it is also that time of the year for final projects and papers and final exams and lots of grading.

So one has to be extra efficient and to optimize. Of course, Operations Research is the way to go!

In the last week alone there have been 4 parties to go to and one we were actually involved in helping to organize and that was the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter party that took place at the Isenberg School of Management on December 9. It is challenging enough putting on a great party when it is at your home but when it is at another location (our business school) plus the temperature is in the teens with a strong wind blowing that certainly adds to the drama. You want to make sure that the hot food arrives hot and that your cookies don't get blown away!

The students, especially the Chapter Officers, did a wonderful job walking around and inviting faculty and staff personally to come. That special touch adds a lot. They also did an excellent job of demand forecasting. I admit there have been times in the past that by 5PM (with the party beginning at 4:30PM) the food was almost gone but not this year. They also produced and circulated the nice announcement below.

Not all of our operations research and management science students have cars so that is also a challenge but, luckily, they can usually find one or two volunteers ready to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and find the best route for picking up the orders. I always make great use of network project planning techniques such as the Critical Path Method.

Plus, this year's President, Pritha Dutta, has good connections with pizza parlors, and is a trusted customer, and one delivered huge, piping hot pizzas to the Isenberg School for our party. The pizza went really fast especially the one with tortilla chips on it!

I always say that life in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts is foodie heaven with places such as Whole Foods, Big Y, Atkins, a Turkish market, among other grocery stores and in the summertime - outdoor farmers' markets. My doctoral student, Deniz Besik, a fellow foodie, and researcher of food supply chains, made sure that there were fruit and veggies on the menu. Plus, this year we had a lot to celebrate! The UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter received the Cum Laude Award from INFORMS (its 11th award in as many consecutive years), and I was so happy to receive the Distinguished Volunteer Service Award, so we had chocolate cake!

Although it was the end of the semester with extra meetings and office hours, I had to bake for the party and brought a lot of my cookies, with some favorites being Swedish cookies, which always bring me back to Gothenburg, a city in Sweden that I love (besides Stockholm and several others).

And, as is our tradition, varenyky (pierogies) filled with potatoes and cheese, and cabbage mushroom ones, along with kielbasy (all hot), we also brought. Thank goodness there was a parking spot right in front of the Isenberg School that day because in some years I have marched with trays of food for our parking lot as students ran out to help me.

Of course, the ambience for the party is important and we have our favorite location in the Isenberg School, Room 112, for it. The students have music in the background and a slide show of our activities. It is an exceptional way in which to relax, catch up with faculty, students, and staff in a very hospitable and warm environment with great food! Everyone leaves well-nourished, relaxed, and energized, and we share the photos that we take, although sometimes we talk so much we don't take as many photos as we would like.

A special thanks to the faculty who came not only from the Isenberg School on a frigid Friday in December but also from the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and the Department of Civil Engineering from the other side of the sprawling UMass Amherst campus! We even had some family members, including a grandmother from Ukraine. Your support of students and operations research / management science is very meaningful and appreciated.

When I looked at all the students in attendance from countries such as the US, India, Turkey, China, Singapore, Mexico, Greece, Egypt (but now a US citizen), and even Mongolia, and these are just the ones that I had a chance to speak to in person, I see that there is hope in our United Nations of operations researchers and management scientists!

Professor Sarkis also mentioned in his presentation that he, like I and my research group, have been working on sustainability for a while - actually two decades and since we are hearing that "sustainability" is some fields, including operations management, is being perceived as being relatively new, I thought it deserved some commentary.

I have always been one who loves nature and I get some of my best ideas on hikes. Clean air, clean water, fresh food, and a healthy, peaceful environment we all deserve and they are essential to our well-being and that of future generations.

As a research topic, I became interested in sustainability while working with two doctoral students at the Isenberg School of Management: Kanwalroop "Kathy" Dhanda and Padma Ramanujam in the 1990s.

Together we wrote the Environmental Networks book, which was published in 1999, and the year after, my Sustainable Transportation Networks book was published.

Vice President Al Gore wrote me a nice letter on the publication of my Sustainable Transportation Networks book, which now hangs in my office at the Isenberg School.

Prior to the publication of these books, I had co-authored several papers, which also provided the seeds for our sustainability work. These included a 1996 paper in Operations Research, written with Sten Thore and one of my first PhD students, Jie Pan, who tragically died of an autoimmune disease shortly after having receiving tenure. With Padma, that same year, we had also published a paper in Transportation Science.

Our more recent research on sustainability and supply chains has focused on numerous different applications, and these are quite fascinating. Much of the impetus has come from outside - such as our work on fashion and sustainability - but some of it has also been internal - as in the case of our blood supply chain sustainability research and driven by common interests and passion that I share with both students and collaborators. Examples of such papers are: Sustainable Fashion Supply Chain Management Under Oligopolistic Competition and Brand Differentiation, Anna Nagurney and Min Yu, International Journal of Production Economics, Special Section on Green Manufacturing and Distribution in the Fashion and Apparel Industries 135: (2012) pp 532-540 and Supply Chain Network Design of a Sustainable Blood Banking System, Anna Nagurney and Amir H. Masoumi, in Sustainable Supply Chains: Models, Methods and Public Policy Implications, T. Boone, V. Jayaraman, and R. Ganeshan, Editors, Springer, London, England (2012) pp 49-72.

Another paper that I am quite proud of in which I move from transportation to supply chains to sustainable cities is, "Design of Sustainable Supply Chains for Sustainable Cities," invited paper for the Complex-City Workshop, December 5-6, 2011, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Environment & Planning B 42(1): (2015) pp 40-57.

Our research on food supply chains, conducted with Professor Min Yu (yes, another former terrific Isenberg UMass PhD alumna in Management Science), and published in the European Journal of Operational Research, also has components of sustainability since we consider waste. The same holds for our work on pharmaceutical supply chains.

And, for those of you interested in perishable product supply chains, including food and medical nuclear ones, in which waste is a big issue, our Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Analytics for Perishable Products, is recommended.

Friday, December 2, 2016

Today we were honored and delighted to have Professor Joe Sarkis, the head of the Department of Management within Worcester Polytechnic Institute's (WPI) Foisie School of Business, deliver the lecture, "Supplier Collaboration and Development for Greening Supply Chains," as part of our UMass Amherst INFORMS Speaker Series. The series is organized by the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter so a special thanks to the chapter President, Pritha Dutta, a doctoral student in Management Science at the Isenberg School of Management, for handling the logistics and for designing the nice poster below.

He motivated his presentation by noting a 2016 McKinsey report on Supply Chain Management and emphasizing the importance of greening the supply chain to industry with the "leading edge of thought" should also be the "leading edge of practice." "We should be doing good," he said, and emphasized the gold mine of research in this area and that showed throughout his presentation as did his passion and energy. He has collaborated with researchers from China, from Egypt, and other countries and, I do admit I am now also working on a paper with him and with two of my former doctoral students, Dr. Sara Saberi who just started as an Assistant Professor at the Foisie Schoo of Business, and Dr. Jose Cruz, from the School of Business at the University of Connecticut, whose work was also mentioned in Sarkis' presentation.

He emphasized levels of problems and different methodologies and theories to tackle them - from global problems, such as global warming, to regional problems of deforestation and acid rain, to more local problems of pesticides and waste.

Of course, he had to mention that there are many different definitions of environmental sustainability (and he even authored a paper on this) and recognized the importance of ISO 14000, life cycle analysis (LCA), and carbon and water footprints. When it comes to supply chains it is essential to "close the loop" and deal not only with forward and reverse supply chains separately. He remarked that energy research is also important for supply chain management and stated that teaching informs his research and vice versa. I so agree with the latter statement and continue to be inspired by questions that my students raise.

It was wonderful to have my Isenberg School colleague, Professor Marta Calas, in the audience since she is working with a doctoral student on sustainability and the fashion brand Eileen Fisher. We have published several papers on fashion and sustainability with my former doctoral student, and now Assistant Professor at the University of Portland, Dr. Min Yu.

The relevance of theory, methodologies, and applications were emphasized and he also discussed whether carrots or sticks should be using for green supply chain management.

I very much liked what he said about different boundaries, including temporal ones, and associated decision-making. He also discussed the different types of flows that are relevant and since we work on networks, optimization, game theory, as well as sustainability I liked the flows of material, service, information, and financial ones noted very much. Also, I appreciated him mentioning different industries from food to the textile industry. On the latter, he is working with a collaborator in Egypt. Afterwards, a doctoral student and UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter officer, Ekin Koker, brought up the automotive industry and sustainability.

Professor Sarkis spoke on his work on "supplier development" and the sharing of knowledge to help suppliers become greener and also about investment in greener technologies.

The theme of different "levels" also resonated, from the individual, to the organizational, the enterprise level, all the way to the circular economy. Also, how leadership in greening the supply chain affects motivation and employees.

The audience clearly had a great experience and benefited a lot from the presentation.

After the energizing and very inspiring talk, I took Professor Sarkis, two of his doctoral students from WPI that had joined us, and three doctoral students from UMass Amherst, Pritha Dutta, Deniz Besik, and Rodrgo Mercado, to lunch at the University Club and the wonderful conversations continued. As Professor Sarkis said at lunch, there is no better life than being a Full Professor at a university!

The food was great and the conversation even better - amazing how some universities are incentivizing researchers to publish in good journals especially those outside the United States. Of course, we also exchanged notes on recent academic hires, the job market, etc. Interestingly, both the Dean of the Foisie School of Business and the Dean of the Isenberg School, Dr. Mark A. Fuller (I admit I served on the search committee for the latter), are in the Information Systems field.

Many thanks to Professor Joe Sarkis for coming to the University of Massachusetts Amherst today. You are welcome back any time! Thanks to Pritha Dutta for capturing the "Bon Voyage"in the photo below.

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

All academics have to be very patient - it takes time to get a PhD, time to get promotion and tenure, and one has to wait referees' reports on journal articles that we submit, which we then revise, and, hopefully, the articles that we have labored so hard on, do get accepted and then published, which also takes time!

It is, hence, advisable to also have activities that one can engage in that one gets more or less instant gratification from and focuses a different part of the brain, although, as an academic, one brings one's analytical and critical thinking skills to almost any endeavor.

This time of the year, when the weather gets colder, and the days shorter, and one has recovered from the Thanksgiving travel and celebrations, I always enjoy baking holiday cookies. But even more so, I enjoy delivering them to friends and neighbors.

The logistics of cookie baking involves identifying the types of cookies to be baked and finding the recipes, procuring the necessary ingredients, scheduling the baking of the cookie varieties (some, serendipitously, might not even require baking, such as our famous chocolate rum walnut balls), waiting for them to cool, decorating them, if necessary, putting them on plates for delivery and packaging them nicely. Then I usually insert a nice holiday card and figure out the optimal routing for delivery, always taking into consideration the day and time of departure to try and find the recipients at home.

This year, the first batches of cookies that I baked took parts of two different days and a big tip is using parchment paper since there is no cleaning of baking pans before putting on the next batch and into the oven.

Below are some photos from this baking project and my family members are the taste testers and approvers.

The ingredients in the cookie recipes this year included lots of almond paste, candied cherries, coconut, pecans, walnuts, chocolate, the usual butter, sugar, and vanilla, plus raspberry jam, to make butter cookies that our wonderful staff member at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, Wivvian Hall, once made for me when I was a Visiting Professor there and then gave me the recipe!

Now, since our friends and neighbors range from very young children to those in the mid80s, and many children like the less fancy cookies, I also make some cookies (see above) with reindeer faces and Christmas trees on them. These are ready to bake.

This past Sunday, we did one of the biggest deliveries, and to see the joy on the neighbors' faces was very special. Even two little boys wrote us a beautiful thank you card and delivered it to our door. It is important, especially in this day and age, to support your immediate community and neighbors and to show that they matter. Baking is a labor of love and a way of saying, in a small way, that someone matters. We will continue to be making deliveries and baking as well, which provide a warm and welcoming break from end of the semester projects, exams, and all sorts of committee meetings.

Of course, I also plan to bake more cookies for various events and parties including our end of the semester UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter party at the Isenberg School of Management. This semester I am teaching a class on Transportation and Logistics and am practicing what I preach.

About Me

is the John F. Smith Memorial Professor of Operations Management at the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College at Oxford University for the 2016 Trinity term.
She was a Visiting Professor at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden for 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015.
Her latest book, co-edited with I. Kotsireas and P.M. Pardalos is: Dynamics of Disasters: Key Concepts, Models, Algorithms, and Insights, published by Springer in 2016. She is also the co-author of the book: Competing on Supply Chain Quality: A Network Economics Perspective, with D. Li, and published in 2016.
She is the author of the book: Networks Against Time: Supply Chain Network Analytics for Perishable Products, co-authored with M. Yu, A.H. Masoumi, and L.S. Nagurney.
She is also the author, with Q. Qiang, of the book: Fragile Networks: Identifying Vulnerabilities and Synergies in an Uncertain World, and several other books.
She is the Founding Director of the Virtual Center for Supernetworks.